4. The End of the Cold War
a. Red Square Is Still Red
b. The Red Calamity Continues

References

* * *

Introduction

The communist cult’s spread across the world is powered by violence and deception. When communism is exported from a powerful country to a weaker one, violence is the quickest and most effective route. The failure of the free world to recognize the cultish character of communism leads it to take lightly the export of communist ideology, including via the Chinese regime’s Grand External Propaganda Program [1].

This chapter will focus on the expansion and infiltration of communist ideology in Asia, Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe. The manner in which Western Europe and North America are infiltrated is far more complex, to be expounded upon in the next chapter.

1. Exporting Revolution to Asia

The Soviet Union’s export of revolution was the real reason the Chinese Communist Party was able to usurp power. In 1919, the Soviet Union established the Third Communist International, which aimed to export revolution around the world. In April 1920, Grigori Voitinsky, the representative of the Third Communist International, traveled to China. In May, an office was set up in Shanghai to make preparations for the formation of the CCP.

Over the next 30 years, the CCP was merely an organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong received a monthly stipend of 160 to 170 yuan from the Russians [2]. (The average monthly salary of a worker in Shanghai at that time was around 20 yuan.)

The CCP’s seizure of power was in part connected with the Communist Party’s infiltration of the United States. This is one of the reasons U.S. President Harry S. Truman cut off support to Chiang Kai-shek while the Soviets continued to support the CCP. Truman also made the decision to exit Asia after World War II. In 1948, the U.S. Army left South Korea, and on January 5, 1950, Truman announced that the United States would no longer interfere with affairs in Asia. This included the cessation of military assistance to Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan, including in the case of a war between the PRC and the Republic of China.

A week later, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson reiterated Truman’s policy [3] and said that if war were to break out on the Korean Peninsula, the United States would not get involved. [4] These anti-intervention policies provided an opportunity for the Communist Party to expand its influence in Asia. When North Korea invaded the South, and the United Nations sent troops, the United States changed its policy.

The CCP went all out in trying to export revolution. In addition to training guerrilla fighters in different countries, providing weapons, and sending troops to fight against legitimate governments, it also provided significant financial support for insurrections. During the heat of the Great Cultural Revolution in 1973, the CCP’s foreign aid spending reached its peak: 7 percent of the national fiscal expenditure.

According to Qian Yaping, a Chinese scholar with access to secret documents released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “10,000 tons of rice were shipped to Guinea and 15,000 tons of wheat were sent to Albania in 1960. From 1950 to end of 1964, the total foreign aid expenditure was 10.8 billion yuan, during which time the most expenditure was from 1960 to 1964, when the great famine was going on in China.” [5]

During the famine from 1958 to 1962, tens of millions died of hunger. Yet foreign aid expenditures totaled 2.36 billion yuan. [6] If these expenditures had been used to purchase food, it would have saved 30 million people. All those people died because of the CCP’s Great Leap Forward movement, and they were simultaneously victims of the CCP’s attempts at exporting revolution.

a. The Korean War

Communism seeks to conquer the world in order to destroy mankind. It exploits the human hunger for fame and fortune to mislead people into spreading its evil ideology. Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Ho Chi Minh were driven by such desires.

At a meeting with Stalin in 1949, Mao promised to send over a million troops and over 10 million workers to help Stalin’s expansion into Europe in exchange for Mao’s control over North Korea. [7] On June 25, 1950, after extensive planning, North Korea invaded the South, and in three days, Seoul was taken. After a month and a half, the entire Korean Peninsula was occupied by the North.

Before the war broke out, in March 1950, Mao amassed a large number of troops near the Korean border to have them ready for war. The details of the war itself are beyond the scope of this chapter, but in short, the war stretched on because of Truman’s policy of appeasement. The CCP sent a “volunteer army” to the peninsula with another secret agenda: to get rid of the more than 1 million Kuomintang soldiers who had surrendered during the civil war. [8] By the end of the Korean War, casualties on the Chinese side were over a million.

The outcome of the Korean War was a split peninsula. Since the CCP and the Soviet Communist Party fought for control of North Korea, the North benefited from both sides. For example, in 1966 when Kim Il Sung visited China, he discovered that a subway was under construction in Beijing. He then requested that an identical subway be constructed in Pyongyang — for free.

Mao immediately decided to halt the construction in Beijing and sent equipment and personnel — including two divisions of the PLA’s Railway Corps and numerous engineers, totaling several tens of thousands of people — to Pyongyang. The North didn’t spend a penny or use any of its own people in the construction, yet demanded that the CCP guarantee the safety of the subway in times of war. In the end, Pyongyang’s subway system became one of the deepest in the world at the time, with an average depth of 90 meters (295 feet) and a maximum depth of 150 meters (492 feet) underground.

After the construction was completed, Kim Il Sung told the public that it had been designed and built by Koreans. Moreover, Kim often bypassed the CCP and went directly to the Soviet Union for money and materiel. After the Korean War, the CCP deliberately left some people in North Korea with the mission of bringing the North closer to Beijing and prying it away from Moscow. Kim either killed or jailed the CCP personnel, and the CCP ended up losing on all fronts. [9]

After the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party, the CCP decreased its aid to North Korea. In the 1990s, the North Korean people were starving. In 2007, the nongovernmental organization Association of North Korean Defectors reported that in the 60 years of Kim’s rule, at least 3.5 million died of hunger and related diseases. [10] This is another bloody debt of the communists’ exported revolution.

b. The Vietnam War

Before the Vietnam War, the CCP supported the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) to defeat France in 1954, resulting in the 1954 Geneva Conference and the confrontation between North and South Vietnam. Later, France retreated from Vietnam. The invasion of North Vietnam into the South and the intervention of the United States made the Vietnam War more intense. It became the largest war in a single theater after World War II. The U.S. military participated in the war from 1964 to 1973.

As early as 1952, Mao sent advisory groups to the CPV. The head of the military advisory group was General Wei Guoqing of the PLA. The land reform advisory group dispatched by the CCP detained and executed tens of thousands of landlords and rich peasants in Vietnam, triggering famine and peasant riots in the North. The CCP and the CPV together suppressed these uprisings and launched rectification movements of the Party and army, similar to the Yan’an Rectification Movement launched by the CCP. (The Yan’an Rectification Movement, from 1942 to 1944, was the first ideological mass movement — involving propaganda, detention, thought reform, and the like — initiated by the CCP.)

In order to become the leader of communism in Asia, Mao aided Vietnam on a large scale, despite the fact that tens of millions of people were starving to death in China. In 1962, Liu Shaoqi, vice chairman of the CCP, ended Mao’s frenzied policy at the 7,000 People’s Assembly, preparing to restore the economy to health and effectively marginalize Mao. But Mao refused to cede power, so he brazenly made China enter the Vietnam War, while Liu, who had no power base in the military, had to sideline his plans for economic recovery.

In 1963, Mao dispatched Luo Ruiqing and Lin Biao to Vietnam in succession. Liu promised Ho Chi Minh that the CCP would shoulder the cost of the Vietnam War itself. He said, “You can take China as your home front if there’s a war.”

With the instigation and support of the CCP, in July 1964, the CPV attacked a U.S. warship with torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin, creating the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which triggered the United States’ participation in the war. Subsequently, in order to compete with the Soviet Union for influence over Vietnam, the CCP spent treasure, weapons, and blood.

Historian Chen Xianhui wrote in his book The Truth of the Revolution — The 20th Century Chronicle of China: “Mao’s support for Vietnam brought disaster. It caused the death of five million civilians, led to landmines and ruin everywhere, and caused the economy to collapse. … The support the CCP provided the CPV included the following: Weapons, ammunition, and other military supplies sufficient to equip more than two million soldiers in the army, navy, and air force; more than 100 production companies and repair factories; over 300 million meters of cloth; over 30,000 cars; hundreds of kilometers of railroads; over five million tons of food; over two million tons of gasoline; over 3,000 kilometers of oil pipelines; hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars. Apart from these goods and money supplies, the CCP also secretly dispatched over 300,000 PLA troops who then donned North Vietnamese fatigues to fight against the South Vietnamese and U.S. militaries. To ensure the secret was kept, numerous Chinese soldiers who died in the war were buried in Vietnam.” [11]

By 1978, the CCP’s total aid to Vietnam reached $20 billion, while China’s GDP in 1965 was only 70.4 billion yuan (approximately $28.6 billion at the official exchange rate at the time).

In 1973, the United States compromised with the domestic anti-war movement, which was actually instigated by communists, and withdrew its troops from Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnam occupied Saigon and took South Vietnam. Under the direction of the CCP, the CPV began suppressions similar to the CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. More than 2 million people in South Vietnam risked death to flee the country, becoming the largest refugee wave in Asia during the Cold War.

In 1976, the whole of Vietnam fell to communism.

c. The Khmer Rouge

The CPV asked the CCP to provide large-scale assistance to Vietnam during the Vietnam War, but this later became one of the reasons China and Vietnam became hostile to each other. In order to export revolution, the CCP loaded Vietnam with huge amounts of aid in order to have it keep fighting the United States. Vietnam didn’t want the war to drag out so long, so it joined the U.S.-led four-nation talks (which excluded China) from 1969.

In the 1970s, after the Lin Biao incident, Mao urgently needed to establish prestige in China. In addition, Sino–Soviet relations had worsened after the Zhenbao Island incident, a locally contained military conflict between the two powers. Mao thus cooperated with the United States to counteract the Soviet Union and invited U.S. President Richard Nixon to visit China.

Meanwhile, facing opposition to the Vietnam War back home, the United States was loath to continue fighting. Vietnam and the United States signed a peace agreement. It was then that Vietnam drifted away from the CCP and came into the orbit of the Soviet Union.

Mao was unhappy with this and decided to use Cambodia to put pressure on Vietnam. Relations between Vietnam and Cambodia became worse, and the two countries eventually went to war.

The CCP’s support for the Communist Party of Kampuchea (broadly known as the Khmer Rouge) began in 1955, with Khmer leaders receiving training in China. Pol Pot, the paramount leader of the Khmer Rouge regime, was appointed by Mao in 1965. Mao provided money and arms to the Khmer and, in 1970 alone, provided Pol Pot with weapons and equipment for 30,000 people.

After the United States withdrew from French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), the local governments were unable to resist the CCP-supported communists, and so the Laotian and Cambodian regimes fell into their hands in 1975.

Laos fell to Vietnam while Cambodia came under the control of the CCP-backed Khmer Rouge. To implement the CCP’s policy and teach Vietnam a lesson, the Khmer Rouge repeatedly invaded southern Vietnam, which had been united by the CPV in 1975. It slaughtered residents at the Cambodian–Vietnamese border and tried to occupy the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Vietnam’s relationship with the CCP was bad, while its relationship with the Soviet Union was good. With the support of the Soviets, Vietnam began attacking Cambodia in December 1978.

After Pol Pot seized power, he ruled with extreme terror. He announced the abolition of currency, ordered all urban residents to join collective forced-labor squads in the countryside, and slaughtered intellectuals. In little more than three years, more than a quarter of the country’s population had been killed or had died from unnatural causes. Nevertheless, Pol Pot was touted by CCP leaders Zhang Chunqiao and Deng Yingchao.

After the war between Vietnam and Cambodia began, the Cambodian people began to support the Vietnamese army. In just one month, the Khmer Rouge collapsed, lost the capital Phnom Penh, and was forced to flee into the mountains and fight as guerrillas.

In 1997, Pol Pot’s erratic behavior caused quarrels within his own camp. He was arrested by Khmer commander Ta Mok and, in a public trial, was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1998, he died from a heart attack. In 2014, despite the CCP’s repeated attempts at obstruction, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia sentenced two Khmer leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, to life in prison.

Vietnam’s war with Cambodia infuriated Deng Xiaoping. For this and other reasons, Deng set off a war against Vietnam in 1979, calling it a “counterattack for self-defense.”

d. Other Parts of Asia

The CCP’s export of revolution had painful repercussions for the Chinese diaspora. Numerous anti-Chinese incidents broke out around the world, and at least several hundred thousand overseas Chinese were murdered. Many also had their right to do business and receive an education restricted.

One typical example was in Indonesia. During the 1950s and 1960s, the CCP provided significant financial and military support to Indonesia to prop up the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI). The PKI was the largest political group at the time, with three million direct members. Added to that, its affiliated organizations brought the combined total affiliates and members to twenty-two million scattered across Indonesia’s government, political system, and military, including many close to the first Indonesian president, Sukarno. [12]

Mao was criticizing the Soviet Union at the time for supporting “revisionism” and strongly encouraged the PKI to take the path of violent revolution. PKI leader Aidit was an admirer of Mao and was preparing to stage a military coup.

On September 30, 1965, right-wing military leader Suharto crushed this attempted coup, cut ties with China, and purged a large number of PKI members. The cause of this purge is related to Zhou Enlai. During one of the international meetings between the communist countries, Zhou promised the Soviet Union and representatives of other communist countries: “There are so many overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Chinese government has the ability to export communism through these overseas Chinese, and make Southeast Asia change color overnight.” From this point on, large-scale anti-Chinese movements began in Indonesia. [13]

The anti-Chinese movement in Burma (also known as Myanmar) was similar. In 1967, soon after the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Consulate in Burma, as well as the local branch of the Xinhua News Agency, began heavily promoting the Cultural Revolution among overseas Chinese, encouraging students to wear Mao badges, study his Little Red Book, and confront the Burmese government.

The military junta under the rule of Gen. Ne Win gave orders to outlaw the wearing of badges with Mao’s image and the study of Mao’s writings, and to shut down Chinese schools.

On June 26, 1967, a violent anti-Chinese incident took place in the capital Yangon, where dozens were beaten to death and hundreds injured. In July 1967, the CCP’s official media called for “firmly supporting the people of Myanmar under the leadership of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to start armed conflicts and start a major revolt against the Ne Win government.”

Soon after, the CCP sent out a military counsel team to assist the CPB, along with over 200 active soldiers to join them. They also ordered large groups of CPB members who had lived in China for many years to return to Burma and join the struggle. Afterward, a large number of Chinese Red Guards and CPB forces attacked Burma from Yunnan, defeating the Burmese government forces and taking control of the Kokang region. More than 1,000 Chinese youth sent from Yunnan died on the battlefield. [14]

About the time of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP’s attempts at exporting revolution involved the promotion of violence and the provision of military training, weapons, and funding. When the CCP stopped trying to export revolution, communist parties in various countries all disintegrated and were unable to recover. The Communist Party of Indonesia was a typical case.

In 1961, the Malaysian Communist Party (MCP) decided to abandon armed conflict and instead gain political power through legal elections. Deng Xiaoping called MCP leaders Chin Peng and others to Beijing, demanding that they continue their efforts at violent insurrection because at the time the CCP believed that a revolutionary high tide centered around the Vietnamese battlefield would soon sweep Southeast Asia.

The MCP thus continued its armed struggle and attempted revolutions for another 20 years. [15] The CCP funded the MCP, having them procure arms on the black market in Thailand, and in January 1969, established the Malaysian Sound of Revolution Radio Station in Yiyang City, Hunan Province, to broadcast in Malaysian, Thai, English, and other languages. [16]

After the Cultural Revolution, during a meeting between Singapore’s President Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping, Lee requested that Deng stop the radio broadcasts of the MCP and the Communist Party of Indonesia into China. At the time, the CCP was surrounded by enemies and isolated, and Deng had just regained power and required international support, so he accepted the recommendation. Deng met with MCP leader Chin Peng and set a deadline to shut down the broadcasts agitating for communist revolution. [17]

In addition to the countries noted above, the CCP also attempted to export the revolution to the Philippines, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Japan, and elsewhere, in some cases providing military training, and in some cases spreading propaganda. Some of these communist organizations later became internationally acknowledged terrorist groups. For example, the Japanese Red Army, which became notorious for its anti-monarchist and pro-violent revolutionary slogans, was responsible for a plane hijacking, the massacre of civilians at an airport, and a range of other terrorist incidents.

2. Exporting Revolution to Africa and Latin America

During the Cultural Revolution, the CCP often quoted a slogan by Karl Marx: “The proletariat can liberate itself only by liberating all of humanity.” The CCP preaches world revolution. In the 1960s, the former Soviet Union was going through a period of contraction and was forced to promote an ideological line of retrenching efforts at external revolution. The goal became to peacefully coexist with Western capitalist countries and provide less support to Third World revolutionary movements.

The CCP called this policy “revisionism.” In the early 1960s, CCP Ambassador to the Soviet Union Wang Jiaxiang made a similar proposal but was criticized by Mao as being too friendly to the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries, and not supportive enough of the world revolutionary movement. Therefore, in addition to exporting revolution to Asia, Mao also competed with the Soviet Union in Africa and Latin America.

In August 1965, CCP Minister of National Defense Lin Biao claimed in his article “Long Live the Victory of the People’s War!” that a high tide in world revolution was imminent. According to Mao’s theory of “encircling the cities from rural areas” (which is how the CCP seized power in China), the article compares North America and Western Europe to cities and imagines Asia, Africa, and Latin America as rural areas. Therefore, exporting revolution to Asia, Africa, and Latin America became an important political and ideological task for the CCP.

a. Latin America

Professor Cheng Yinghong of Delaware State University wrote the following in his article “Exporting Revolution to the World: An Exploratory Analysis of the Influence of the Cultural Revolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America”:

In Latin America, Maoist communists in the mid-1960s established organizations in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The main members were young people and students. With the support of China, in 1967 Maoists in Latin America established two guerrilla groups: The Popular Liberation Army of Colombia[, which] included a female company that mimicked the Red Detachment of Women and was called the María Cano Unit[, and] Bolivia’s Ñancahuazú Guerrilla, or National Liberation Army of Bolivia. Some communists in Venezuela also launched armed violence actions in the same period.

In addition, the left leader of the Peruvian Communist Party, Abimael Guzmán, was trained in Beijing in the late 1960s. Apart from studying explosives and firearms, more importantly was his grasping of Mao Zedong Thought, particularly ideas of “the spirit transforming to matter,” and that with the correct route, one can go from “not having personnel to having personnel; not having guns to having guns,” and other mantras of the Cultural Revolution.

Guzmán was the leader of the Peruvian Communist Party (also known as the “Shining Path”), which was identified by the U.S., Canadian, EU, and Peruvian governments as a terrorist organization.

In 1972, when Mexico and the CCP established diplomatic relations, the first Chinese ambassador to Mexico was Xiong Xianghui. Xiong was a CCP intelligence agent sent to monitor Hu Zongnan (a general in the Republic of China Army) during the Chinese civil war. The intent behind making him the ambassador was to collect intelligence (including about the United States) and interfere with the Mexican government. Just one week before Xiong Xianghui took office, Mexico announced the arrest of a group of “guerrillas trained in China.” This is further evidence of the CCP’s attempts at exporting revolution. [18]

Cuba was the first country in Latin America to establish diplomatic ties with the CCP. In order to win over Cuba and at the same time compete with the Soviet Union for the leadership of the international communist movement, the CCP extended to Che Guevara a $60 million loan in November 1960 when he visited China. This was at a time when the Chinese people were dying of starvation from the Great Leap Forward campaign. Zhou Enlai also told Guevara that the loan could be waived through negotiations.

When Fidel Castro began leaning toward the Soviet Union after Sino–Soviet relations broke down, the CCP sent a large number of propaganda pamphlets to Cuban officials and civilians through the embassy in Havana in an attempt to instigate a coup against the Castro regime. [19]

b. Africa

Cheng also described in the article “Exporting Revolution to the World” how the CCP influences the independence of African countries and what kind of path they take after independence:

According to Western media reports, before the mid-1960s, some African revolutionary youth from Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cameroon, and Congo received training in Harbin, Nanjing, and other Chinese cities. A member of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) described his one-year training in Shanghai. In addition to military training, it was mainly political studies, how to mobilize rural people and launch guerrilla warfare with the goal of people’s war. An Oman guerrilla described his training received in China in 1968. He was sent by the organization first to Pakistan, then took a Pakistan Airlines plane to Shanghai, then to Beijing.

After visiting model schools and communes in China, he was sent to a training camp for military training and ideological education. … The curriculum of Mao Zedong’s works was the most important in the schedule. Trainees must memorize many quotations from Mao. The part about discipline and how to interact with the rural masses was very similar to the “Three Major Disciplines and Eight Items of Attention” used by the People’s Liberation Army. The African trainees also witnessed China during the Cultural Revolution. For example, during a visit to a school, when a teacher asked “how to treat gangster elements,” students replied repeatedly in unison “Kill. Kill. Kill.” … At the end of the training, every Omani trainee received a book by Mao translated into Arabic. [20]

Assistance to Tanzania and Zambia was the largest of the CCP’s external revolution projects in Africa in the 1960s.

The CCP sent a large number of experts from the Shanghai Textile Industry Bureau to help build the Tanzanian Friendship Textile Factory. The person in charge injected a strong ideological tone into these aid projects. Upon arrival in Tanzania, he organized a rebel team, hung the five-star red flag of the PRC on the construction site, erected a statue of Mao and Mao’s quotations, played Cultural Revolution music, and sang Mao quotes. The construction site became a model of the Cultural Revolution overseas. He also organized a propaganda team to promote Mao Zedong Thought and actively spread rebellious views among Tanzanian workers. Tanzania was not happy about the CCP’s attempts to export revolution.

Afterward, Mao decided to build a Tanzania–Zambia railway that would also connect East Africa with Central and southern Africa. The railway passed through mountains, valleys, turbulent rivers, and lush forests. Many areas along the route were deserted and inhabited only by wildlife. Some of the roadbeds, bridges, and tunnels were constructed on foundations of silt and sand, making the work extremely difficult. There were 320 bridges and 22 tunnels built.

China sent 50,000 laborers, of whom 66 died, and spent nearly 10 billion yuan. It took six years to complete the work, from 1970 to 1976. However, due to poor and corrupt management in Tanzania and Zambia, the railway went bankrupt. The equivalent cost of the railway today would be hundreds of billions of Chinese yuan, or in the tens of billions of U.S. dollars.

3. Exporting Revolution to Eastern Europe

a. Albania

The CCP not only exported revolutions to Africa and Latin America, but also spent a great deal of effort to gain influence over Albania, another communist country. As early as when Nikita Khrushchev gave his secret speech marking the era of de-Stalinization, Albania was ideologically aligned with the CCP. Mao was greatly pleased, and thus he began the program of giving “aid” to Albania, regardless of the cost.

Xinhua News Agency reporter Wang Hongqi wrote, “From 1954 to 1978, China provided financial aid to the Party of Labour of Albania 75 times; the sum in the agreement was more than 10 billion Chinese yuan.”

At the time, the population of Albania was only around two million, which meant each person received the equivalent of four thousand Chinese yuan. On the other hand, the average annual income of a Chinese person at the time was no more than two hundred yuan. Within this period, China was also experiencing the Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine, as well as the economic collapse caused by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

During the Great Famine, China used its extremely scarce hard currency foreign reserves to import food supplies. In 1962, Rez Millie, the Albanian ambassador to China, demanded aid in food supplies. Under the command of Party vice chairman Liu, the Chinese ship carrying wheat purchased from Canada and due for China changed course and unloaded the wheat at an Albanian port. [22]

Meanwhile, Albania took the CCP’s aid for granted and wasted it. The enormous amount of steel, machine equipment, and precision instruments sent from China were left exposed to the elements. Albanian officials were dismissive: “It’s of little importance. If it breaks or disappears, China will simply give us more.”

China helped Albania construct a textile factory, but Albania did not have cotton, so China had to use its foreign reserves to buy cotton for Albania. On one occasion, the vice president of Albania, Adil Çarçani, asked Di Biao, the Chinese ambassador in Albania at the time, to replace major equipment at a fertilizer factory, and demanded that the equipment be from Italy. China then bought machines from Italy and installed them for Albania.

Such so-called aid only instills greed and laziness in the recipient. In October 1974, Albania demanded a loan of five billion yuan from China. At the time, it was late in the Cultural Revolution, and China’s economy had collapsed almost completely. In the end, China still decided to lend one billion yuan. However, Albania was greatly unsatisfied and started an anti-Chinese movement in its country with slogans like “We shall never bow our heads in the face of economic pressure from a foreign country.” It also declined to support China with petroleum and asphalt.

b. Soviet Repression in Eastern Europe

The socialist system in Eastern Europe was entirely a product of the Soviet Union. After World War II, according to the division of power laid down at the Yalta Conference, Eastern Europe was handed over to the Soviet Union.

In 1956, after Khrushchev’s secret speech, Poland was the first country where protests broke out. After protests by factory workers, a crackdown, and apologies from the government, Poland elected Władysław Gomułka, who was hawkish on the Soviet Union and willing to stand up to Khrushchev.

An attempted revolution in Hungary then took place in October 1956. A group of students gathered and toppled the bronze statue of Stalin in Budapest. Soon after, many joined the protest and clashed with police. Police opened fire, and at least 100 protesters were killed.

The Soviet Union initially wished to cooperate with the newly established opposition party and named János Kádár as the first secretary of the Party Central Committee and Imre Nagy as the chairman of the Council of Ministers and prime minister. After Nagy came to power, he withdrew from the Warsaw Pact (a Soviet-led defense treaty) and further pushed for liberalization. The Soviet Union was unwilling to tolerate this, so they invaded, arrested Nagy, and executed him. [23]

The Hungarian incident was followed by Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring in 1968. After the secret report by Khrushchev, regulations in Czechoslovakia began to loosen up. For several subsequent years, a relatively independent civil society was being formed. One of the representative figures was Václav Havel, who later became the president of what became the Czech Republic in 1993.

With this social backdrop, on January 5, 1968, the reformist Alexander Dubček took over as first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He strengthened reforms and promoted the slogan of “humane socialism.” Soon afterward, Dubček began rehabilitating, on a large scale, individuals who had been wrongly persecuted during the Stalin period. Dissidents were released, control over the media was loosened, academic freedom was encouraged, citizens could travel abroad freely, surveillance over religions was reduced, limited intra-party democracy was allowed, and so on.

The Soviet Union considered such reforms a betrayal of the principle of socialism and feared that other countries would follow. From March to August 1968, the leaders of the Soviet Union, including Leonid Brezhnev, held five conferences with Dubček, trying to pressure him into abandoning democratic reforms. Dubček rejected the entreaties. As a result, in August 1968, more than 6,300 Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring, which had begun eight months prior, was crushed. [24]

Judging from the Hungary incident and the end of the Prague Spring, we can see that socialism in Eastern Europe was forced upon the people there and violently maintained by the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union let up slightly, socialism in Eastern Europe began falling away immediately.

The classic example is the fall of the Berlin Wall. On October 6, 1989, multiple cities in Eastern Germany were holding massive protests and marches, clashing with police. At the time, Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting Berlin. He told the general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Erich Honecker, that reform was the only way forward.

Immediately afterward, East Germany lifted travel restrictions to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. This allowed vast numbers of people to defect to Western Germany through Czechoslovakia, and the Berlin Wall could no longer stop the waves of fleeing citizens. On November 9, the East gave up on the partition. Tens of thousands of residents poured into West Berlin, and the wall was dismantled. The symbol of a communist iron curtain that had stood for decades disappeared into history. [25]

The year 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, was full of turmoil. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Germany all achieved liberty, freeing themselves of socialist rule. This was also the result of the Soviet Union giving up on its own policies of interference. In 1991, the Soviet Union fell, marking the end of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union’s interference in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America was not limited to the few examples described above.

Similarly, in the past few decades, the Chinese Communist Party has aided 110 countries. One of the Party’s most important considerations for giving aid is the export of its ideology.

The purpose of this chapter is simply to show that the spreading of violence is a vital method that communism uses to expand internationally. The more population and land the specter controls, the easier it is to destroy humanity.

4. The End of the Cold War

The end of the Cold War was a great relief for many. They thought that socialism, communism, and similar tyrannies had finally come to an end. But this was simply another way for communism to win. The standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union diverted people’s attention away from the Chinese Communist Party and gave it time to carry out more malicious and sneaky schemes.

The Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, marked the rise of Party leader Jiang Zemin. Aided by the Party’s suppression and propaganda machine that had already matured, Jiang continued to systematically destroy traditional culture and manufacture Party culture. By destroying morals, Jiang cultivated a society of “wolf cubs,” youth who were anti-tradition and anti-morality, which made way for the large-scale persecution of Falun Gong and eventual destruction of humankind.

Although communists have fallen from power in the former communist countries, communism has never been tried for the crimes it committed on a global level. Russia similarly has never purged the Soviet influence or abolished the secret police apparatus. A former KGB agent who later served as Russia’s secret police chief is now in charge of the country. Communist ideologies and their followers are not only still active but are spreading their influence to the West and around the world.

The anti-communist activists in the West—the older generations who have a deeper understanding of communism—are gradually dying out, while members of the newer generations lack a sufficient understanding of, and the will to understand, communism’s evil, murderous, and deceptive nature. Consequently, communists have been able to continue their radical or progressive movements to destroy the existing ideologies and social structures and even seize power through violence.

a. Red Square Is Still Red

As other former communist countries called for independence in succession, people in the Soviet Union also yearned for change. Politics fell into chaos, the economy collapsed, and Russia was isolated in foreign affairs. Then, Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared that the Soviet Communist Party was illegal and restricted its activities. People were energetic in expressing their long-held contempt for the Party, and on December 26, 1991, the Supreme Soviet passed a law to dissolve the Soviet Union, marking the end of its sixty-nine-year rule.

But how could deeply rooted communist ideologies yield so easily? Yeltsin set off a decommunization campaign upon establishing the Russian Federation. Statues of Lenin were pulled down, Soviet books were burned, former Soviet government employees were laid off, and many Soviet-related objects were smashed or burned—but all this still didn’t get to the essence of communism.

The de-Nazification movement after World War II was much more thorough. From the public trials of Nazi war criminals to the cleansing of fascist ideology, the very word “Nazi” is now tied to a sense of shame. Even today, the hunt for former Nazis continues in order to bring them to justice.

Unfortunately for Russia, where communist forces were still strong, the absence of a thorough purge of communism left room for them to make a comeback. In October 1993—only two years after the citizens of Moscow had taken to the streets to demand their independence and democracy—tens of thousands of Moscow citizens marched on the city square, shouting the names of Lenin and Stalin and waving the former Soviet flags.

The rally in 1993 was of communists asking for the reinstatement of the Soviet system. The presence of troops and police only exacerbated the confrontation. At the critical moment, the security services and military officials chose to support Yeltsin, who then dispatched military tanks to quiet down the crisis. Yet communist forces still remained and established the Russian Communist Party, which became the largest political party in the country until it was replaced by the current ruling party, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia.

In recent years, in some surveys (such as those conducted by Moscow’s RBK TV from 2015 to 2016), many respondents (about 60 percent) have said that the Soviet Union should be reborn. In May 2017, many Russians commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s rise to power. The Soviet Communist Youth League (Komsomol), which was established during the Soviet Union, held an oath-swearing ceremony for youths joining them in Moscow’s Red Square before Lenin’s tomb. At the rally, the chairman of Russia’s Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, claimed that sixty thousand new recruits had joined the Party recently and that the Communist Party continued to survive and expand.

In Moscow alone, there are almost eighty monuments to Lenin, whose body entombed in Red Square continues to attract tourists and followers. Red Square is still red. The KGB has never been thoroughly exposed and condemned by the world. Communism is still present in Russia, and believers of communism still abound.

b. The Red Calamity Continues

There are currently four countries ruled by avowed communist regimes: China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos. Although North Korea has abandoned Marxist-Leninist communism on the surface, in actuality, it is still a communist totalitarian state. Before the Cold War, there were twenty-seven communist countries. Now, there are thirteen countries where communist parties are allowed to participate in politics, while there are currently about one hundred twenty countries that have registered communist parties. But over the past century, communist influence in government has faded away in most countries.

By the 1980s, there were more than fifty communist parties in Latin America, with a total membership of one million (of which the Communist Party of Cuba accounted for roughly half). In the earlier half of the 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union were in fierce competition in the hot spots of Latin America and Asia. With the collapse of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, communism gradually became weaker. Communist parties that focused on violence to enforce their rule, like the Peruvian Communist Party (widely known as Shining Path), became fewer and fewer.

However, the majority of these countries still came under variants of socialism. Rather than calling themselves communist, the political parties took on names like the Democratic Socialist Party, the People’s Socialist Party, and the like. About ten communist parties in Central America removed “communist party” from their names but continued to promote communist and socialist ideologies, becoming even more deceptive in their operations.

Of the thirty-three independent countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the majority have communist parties that are accepted as legitimate political players. In Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere, the communist party and the ruling party often form coalition governments, while communist parties in other countries play the role of opposition.

In the West and in some countries in other regions, communism did not resort to violent methods as was done in the East. But through subversion, it has subtly infiltrated society and achieved its goals of destroying people’s moral values, destroying the culture God has imparted to them, and spreading communist and socialist ideologies.

The specter has, in fact, gained control over the entire world. Achieving the ultimate goal of destroying humankind is only a step away.

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